


Swan Daughter

by elisabethdarling



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, The Iliad - Homer
Genre: Angst, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Infant Death, Miscarriage, Physical Abuse, dark themes, mild child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:18:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2042325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisabethdarling/pseuds/elisabethdarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I cannot look back, to the darkness and my mother’s screams, to my Spartan father with his kind grey eyes and summery laugh, to my golden apple daughter with her cursed blood , to my brothers and sister and our tangled limbs and mirror faces (and the pearly egg shells, strong like stones, which I have crafted into a diadem)."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swan Daughter

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like whenever Helen is given a voice is is always subdued and much too soft. This is just my interpretation of how her life must have been a slow boil to anger.

As a child, all I ever wanted was to sink into a hole full of milk and honey; to sleep inside of it—safe in the dirt and mud, caked in the earthy blackness and green moss. Hidden there, with nothing bright and beautiful about me. To take comfort in my origins, deep inside the golden yolk of my white pearl egg with my sister’s limbs tangled with mine (or my brother’s? I cannot remember anymore, the shadowy echoes of my swan womb).

When I am eight I get the chance and run out into the garden, past the pomegranate trees in a slow summer heat, but before I can even dig a hole, with my pink finger nails and small hands, my mother discovers me.

She is always fearful for my abduction and I am rarely out of her sight. It is not her husband, Tyndareus that causes darkness to bloom in my mother’s eyes; she waits in quiet horror for retribution for misplacing or harming a child of Zeus. She’s done it before.

“Helen, keep your hands away from the dirt,” She says scrubbing them in cold water, “It’s under your finger nails, what would your father think?”

What would your father think? She says over and over, washing the dirt from under my finger nails so that the tips became raw and red.

Mother takes me to my room, candle lit and dim; there is blue silk and red fruit and hard, shiny emeralds.

“You’ll be safe here, daughter,” She pulls heavy velvet curtains across the windows, “No harm will come to you if you just stay in here.” In the dark rooms of the palace, with the cold marble floors and woven tapestries; there are mazes even I cannot navigate and intruders can only become lost in them.

Clytemnestra is in the corner crying, her dark hair spilling from the tight braids and purple ribbons, “I want to go outside, mother!” Her face is sour and petulant as she takes little uneven breaths.

Leda turns around so fast I hear her bones creak, “You’ll stay here, in here, where it is safe. What would your father think?” She leaves in a manic hurry, locking the door behind her.

I stare at my sister from across the room (we can both see in the perfect blackness) her eyes are wide and dark.

“Castor is missing,” She wipes away her tears and dripping nose. “He is hiding somewhere and won’t come out and mother thinks he has been taken and it’s all your fault. You had to leave and scare mother crazy.”

“I didn’t want to leave.” I say defensively. He came while I was playing in the tide pools, the waters were like crystals and I was enchanted by the reflection of my own face.

The Athenian who took me had put a hand over my mouth and bid me not to scream, spoke sweet words and promises of bringing me to my brother. That was before though, before I knew that I had many brothers.

When I first returned from my abduction, I retold the knowledge that I had gained. I was the daughter of the mightiest of gods, born from an egg. Mother claims my sister and brothers were as well; hatched on the same day, our sticky cries filling the court yard like a harpy quartette.

Pollux and I have hair like golden sunlight and eyes as deep and blue as the lapis lazuli on our mother’s circlet. He whispers to me one night that we cannot all be children of Zeus because Clytemnestra is not beautiful enough and Castor is too sickly. Theyare both dark of hair and eyes, black like coal and onyx.

“Gods are born in the sunlight, Helen. And mortals in the shadow.” His smile is as charming as my own and I smile back. But our sister can hear through the courtyards, she is upon him in an instant and in the tussle they both bleed ichor.

“Why didn’t you scream?” She throws a pillow at me, not for fun, not like the games we play. “Why didn’t you do something?” Clytemnestra has a vicious look about her face.

“He was bigger than me,” My voice is small and watery; “They were all bigger than me. And he, he lied to me, and I couldn’t do anything.”

She gets up and pushes me so hard the wall cracks and I remember we have the same iron bones.

“I hate you.” Her face is twisted and cruel in a way that should be absurd on a child but only makes her more menacing, “And if I could kill you I would.”

The door creaks open and a small face with glossy dark hair peers around the corner, and Pollux comes in with Castor’s hand in his.

“Mother is weeping again so father told us to stay away.” Pollux climbs beside me on the bed and give me a strange look, but doesn’t ask why I am crying as he fingers the warm golden beads of my bracelet.

Clytemnestra digs her finger nails into Castor’s arm, “Where did you go?” She stares, unflinching into his face, they look like mirrors. He lazily lies to her, that’s all the boys ever did though. They were still bronze and strong, we knew they went outside and left us in the dark, the pale and lonely daughters of Zeus.

There is always something distinctly inhuman about the way a demigod walks and their faces are not like the ones of their mortal parents, nor are their charms; there is something deadly in my blood and I have always known this. And yet they bicker, my parents and the Spartans, about which child is a god-child and what egg was woven with immortality.

Let them argue over their divinity, I have never questioned mine.

* * *

  
I am eleven and when I look into Pollux’s face I am enchanted by the way I see my own. We share secrets and say we are the only true children of Zeus. He is sent away to learn to lead armies with Castor and we each keep a lock of the other’s hair. I listen to my mother’s bitter sobbing from outside her door. I do not see him again for many years.

* * *

  
I am twelve when the first whispers of my beauty spread like a poison across Greece; Sparta becomes swollen with the gold and gifts of men who would make me their child bride.

When they will not leave (the suitors who try to come into my room at night with their bruising lips and stinking breath) I fall to my knees beside my king father, “I’m sorry, father, father, I am so sorry.” Weeping on his knee and clinging to his hand; I know his eyes are sad and his back is old and he has no children of his own lineage.

“There will come a time when you are gone from me; across an ocean or a land, with a new family and you will forget me. I am only glad for this time, though it is tumultuous, so that I might stay in your heart a short while longer.”

“We should run away, father. With Pollux and Castor and Clytemnestra. We could go out to sea, like the Athenians, go on adventures. Some place far away from suitors and kingdoms and gods.” His grey eyes light up and he laughs, I have always been able to make my king father laugh.

* * *

  
I am fourteen when a contract has been signed and Menelaus of the House of Atreus is to be my husband. His eyes are green and his skin is golden, he towers above most men and for a moment my heart flutters.

Spartan men had helped him claim his kingdom and soon we would depart across the ocean to his sunny kingdom where there would be viridian mountains and foreign faces and beautiful temples.

But he is actually Agamemnon and his kingdom will not be given to me for he has won me for his brother. Clytemnestra has conquered his heart and they leave on a spring day; my sister who has stolen my freedom in exchange for her own.

I do not blame her and I cannot hate her for it. When she leaves she says she will grow her hair long and hopes to never have a daughter as beautiful as I.

* * *

 

“It is said your house is cursed,” I say to Menelaus months after we are wed and we have received word of a daughter being born to my sister and his brother.

He strikes my face and tells me never to speak of it again. Menelaus is as golden and green as his brother, even more beautiful but his temper is like fire, quick to bite and burn.

I feel the chill of dread in my bones when I touch my lip and find blood on my fingers.

He kills men for imagined slights, cuts the throats of those who stare at me, and causes chaos to erupt in my family’s ancient halls.

My father will make him King one day. King Menelaus with his doomed blood and treacherous family; he will be the fall of Sparta, I am sure.

* * *

 

I am fifteen when I lose my first child, a daughter with strong cries and then silence.

 

* * *

  
I am sixteen when I lose my second, a boy with dark hair and pink skin (I had never seen a miracle before I held my son in my arms). I found him cold in his bed months after his birth, after I grew to love him so.

 

* * *

 

I am seventeen when I make my first sacrifice to Zeus. I catch a dove between my hands and crack its neck, twisting its head off. Its feathers were the whitest I had ever seen and its beak was such a lovely shade of orange, the color of dusk between delicate yellow and pale blue.

I am bloated, like the sun, with a child and my husband has threatened to kill any daughters I have.

“You should not threaten the progeny of gods so idly.” I reply softly, one hand resting on my growing stomach. My skin has become luminous and white; I carry a life with me again. He holds my arm in a bruising grip and speaks in a harsh voice his breath stinks of wine.

"Think of how many children your mighty father has and how many daughters; your faces must blend together in his mind. When has he ever thought of you, the child he left in the dark?” I never thought to have a husband as cruel as he.

In Zeus’ temple I kneel at the bloody alter with hard marble numbing my knees in the dead of winter as I invite a slow monstering into my veins.

I implore to my father, Zeus, for healthy children but my prayers feel empty; he is not with me in the room. He is on Olympus where it is bright and shinning with his beautiful wife and enchanted wine and sweet ambrosia. I am in an empty temple, on a cold dead land, with a barren marriage, and I have always been kept in the dark.  
A shadowy rage pours from my heart and fills my blood; my pulse echoes in my ears like war drums. My hands clutch the alter and I wish for war and death and destruction, I demand them. I am the daughter of the most powerful god, born from an alien womb, and my blood is three parts ichor; my rage should shake foundations as storms do. The stone table cracks beneath my hands and I awake from my stupor.

The space around me is silent and hollow.

If Menelaus was not cursed before, he is now. I keep the bird’s bones and pray for his misery.

 

* * *

  
I am twenty-six and my daughter’s laugh sounds like silver bells. Hermione is as golden as her father with ruddy hair and eyelashes like fantails. And she is so strong, she can wrestle boys twice her size under her firm grip. She is her father’s delight and although she is not a son she is the heir to the throne and keeps her father’s presence away from my bed chambers.

My beauty has not faded, it holds onto me with sticky fingers and I fear I shall never grow old.

Late at night I feel a tug on my spine and I wake up in a flowery meadow bathed in silver starlight. There is a boy there—tall like a man and broad, but with the face of a child. He looks upon me as if he is in love and I am reminded of the wax-winged Icarus who flew to close to the sun. (My heart breaks and I fear Aphrodite intends to kill me with love for this boy.)

“I have come to take you to Troy, my lady, and marry you, for Aphrodite has promised me the most beautiful woman in the world.” His smile is bright and handsome, and he speaks with such joy.

He is Prince Paris of Troy and for his favor a goddess has traded a woman for a title and set in to place the perfect massacre. (There is a drumming in my heart and I know my father has heard my prayers.) Paris reaches out his hand to me and I slowly press my palm to his.

I cannot look back, to the darkness and my mother’s screams, to my Spartan father with his kind grey eyes and summery laugh, to my golden apple daughter with her cursed blood, to my brothers and sister and our tangled limbs and mirror faces (and the pearly egg shells, strong like stones, which I have crafted into a diadem).

I am meant for this. For falling kingdoms and men who are born bright for battle and who cannot touch the brilliance of my golden flames. So much beauty is not meant to be bestowed so carelessly and I will not be cheated of my purpose.

 

* * *

  
I am twenty-eight and my Paris sings poetry to me as men paint the canvas of the earth red with gore outside the city walls. His sweet voice echoes gently around the room and I stare out the window in the direction of Sparta (Who looks after my Hermione while her mother is away and her father is at war?) and imagine what it would have been like if my father had loved me.


End file.
